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Everyone knows that television shows have gotten progressively shorter, with regards to their actual running times. The Wire is a notable exception. It's episodes are all upwards of 55 minutes long, some even over an hour; I can barely watch them because my attention span is so shot from crappy network TV. My good friends over at NBC Universal have hit a new low, though. This past week's hour-long episode of The Office (Are they all going to be an hour now? Because storytelling-wise, it REALLY doesn't work well) topped out at 39 minutes. 30 Rock? 19 minutes. NINETEEN MINUTES. That's embarrassing. I really have no larger point to make here. I just think it's ludicrous that the networks were actually angling to get iTunes customers to pay MORE for shorter shows that are packed to the brim with sponsorship as it is. (No, Hiro Nakamura, I do NOT want to buy a Nissan Versa.)

Dude, Hank Jennings is the new Dillon Panthers head coach!

Now, if they could just get Eric DaRe on Heroes, NBC will have gone a long way towards winning my love back.

I've been meaning to write about this for a little while now, and I'm just going to come right out and say it -- I have a bone to pick with the Emmy nominations committee. I could sit here and blab on and on about Friday Night Lights and bore you all to tears, so I'll make this part short -- Connie Britton not getting nominated for Best Actress in a drama is a TRAVESTY. And I'm kinda cranky on behalf of Adrianne Palicki, whose performance in the last third of the season was a masterstroke, taking a mostly-unsympathetic one-note character and turning her into the character I'm most interested in. But I always knew she was a long-shot, and that Zach GIlford was for Best Supporting Actor, too. Connie Britton...man, I thought she had it in the bag. I am thoroughly disappointed. Inevitably they HAD to nominate Sally Field, because she's frickin' Sally Field, even though that show looks about as interesting as a bag of leaves. And Edie Falco is a no brainer, and everyone loves Mariska Hargitay. She so pretty. But Patricia Arquette and Kyra Sedgwick? Boring, boring, boring. And Minnie Driver, too -- they basically just nominated the two old standbys (Hargitay and Falco) and then everyone else who is better thought of as a film actress for stooping to bring their warm glowing warming glow to the small screen. Gimme a break -- Connie Britton deserves a nomination of Arquette, Sedgwick, and Driver in a heartbeat.

Then you get to best drama, and I start to laugh like a crazy person. Come ON. You're trying to tell me that Boston Legal is a better show than Friday Night Lights, Battlestar Galactica, AND Lost? You're on crack. The Sopranos was a gimme -- even if I grew bored with it after Ade died, it was the last season, so there was no way it was going out without a nod. House is a very well made show, if not completely to my tastes, so I bow to that. Heroes took Lost's slot. I'm kinda OK with that, because I like Heroes a lot, and I think they see it as the new, hip, fun show to nominate. I just happen to think that Lost does crazy sci-fi serial much better. And Grey's Anatomy being nominated for best anything is just fucking ridiculous. That show is a train wreck. It's a consistently entertaining train wreck, but they haven't really been able to pull their shit together this whole season. I knew there was no way in hell that BSG would make it onto the list, but even with an on-and-off season like the one they just had, they're still better than Boston Legal and Grey's in a cakewalk.

I started thinking about what episode of each of my favorite left-out shows should have been submitted, which would catch the high points of the seasons. That's the thing that hurts serialized shows like the ones I tend to like -- the Emmys make you submit a single episode to represent your season, which doesn't really help to win votes from people who've never watched your show before. Grey's Anatomy and The Sopranos are both serials, but they are IMMENSELY POPULAR serials, and people know the characters and what's going on just from the press surrounding the show, so sitting down to watch a single episode doesn't hurt their chances. Heroes is also a serial, but it's got so much hype around it right now that it was going to get nominated no matter what. (For the record, I would have submitted "Company Man" for Heroes -- even though it's a fairly unusual episode for lack of the standard ensemble thrust of the show, it's still impeccably crafted and a great look inside the heretofore-most-inscrutible character, Cheerdaddy Bennett, who I am madly in love with.) For Lost, it's hard -- the stand-out episodes that first sprang to mind were, first, the finale, which was great, and then the Ben flashback episode, and then "The Man From Tallahassee", where Locke gets thrown out a motherfuckin' window. I think I would have to go with "Man From Tallahassee" for my submission, because I don't think I have ever screamed "WHHAAAATT??" at the screen as much as I did when Locke went flailing off the side of that building. For BSG, there's pretty much no doubt in my mind that it has to be "Exodus Pt. 2" because, holy crapweasel, that episode was nonstop excitement. For Friday Night Lights, I know that they submitted the pilot. And while I PERSONALLY thought the pilot was great, I generally don't think that pilots capture what a show turns into over a season-long run. I would go with "Mud Bowl". "Mud Bowl" does everything that show does right, and it does it great. It's intense and emotional and fun at the same time. (On a side-note, I don't think that Adrianne Palicki should have submitted "Mud Bowl" for her episode. It seems like a no-brainer -- that's her big dramatic attempted rape scene. But it's the next episode, "Best Laid Plans" that shows what an amazing and subtle actress she really is as she comes to terms with being attacked.)

And I'm going to go on, just for fun, and make a claim for a Hottest Actor on a Dramatic Series category. We've got Milo Ventimiglia and Sendhil Ramamurthy from Heroes, Henry Ian Cusick and Josh Holloway from Lost (sorry Sayid, you may be my favorite PERSON on the island, but you come in third in my lust sweepstakes...actually, fourth, after crazy eyeliner-wearing immortal Cuban pirate Richard Alpert, but I'm leaving him out because he's not actually in the cast), Kyle Chandler on Friday Night Lights, and Michael Trucco from BSG. Please let me know if I have committed any major oversight here. (No, I will not hear from Matthew Fox and Patrick Dempsey. Both pretty. Both playing DUMB ASS CHARACTERS that totally cancel out any and all physical attractiveness they might possess. I will also listen to petitioners on behalf of Adrian Pasdar and Christopher Meloni, both of whom skeeve me a little bit but whom I will respectfully admit are, in their own creepy ways, hot. Anyone who wants to claim that Apollo is hot is not allowed to read my journal anymore. If James McAvoy were still on Shameless, he'd be all over this category, damn the fact that it's a British show. But his character apparently got shuttled off to France over a drug deal or something, leaving him free to play upstanding working-class gents in period pieces, and human-fawn hybrids in children's movies. The kid who plays Lip on that show is pretty damn cute himself, though...) I would list Hot Principal here, too, but I heard he got killed off of 24. That's a damn shame. I might have actually watched that show if they made it the Mary Lynn Raskjub and Hot Principal Variety Hour.

In other, completely unrelated news, I have finally faced up to the fact that I have a crush on Michael Cera, and I did even when he was 16 on Arrested Development. I am old and gross. The LJ pedophile police will be here to take away my birthday any second now, I am sure.

You know, I feel like in the rush to show that they are cool and hip and totally down with the whole world wide interwebs/series of tubes thing, television networks are forgetting that not everyone has a totally state of the art Intel Xeon 8 core what-the-fuck-ever computer. I've complained about the Comedy Central website before. Now my beef is with NBC. Kudos to them for offering so much great multimedia material for Heroes. I think they really do get it, and they're trying to embrace a new paradigm and move away from their reputation as "The Retards who Took Lazy Sunday off of You Tube". However, I should be able to listen to a commentary on the last episode without the need to run two simultaneous flash videos, not to mention however many other crazy flash ads/frames/everything else on that site. It's just not going to happen on a 1.8ghz G5 iMac with a demonstrably inferior video card (something I have learned again and again at this point). So I'm reduced to listening to bits and pieces of Sendhil Ramamurthy's totally-non-British accent, overlapping itself, while two stupid videos play jerkily. No good. I want a new computer SO BAD.

OK, so NOW I'm into Heroes. I watched the first episode, didn't do it for me. Also, Adrian Pasdar still squicks me out because of Profit. In my mind, Adrian Pasdar himself sleeps in a cardboard box. Then, saw the first half of the second ep, fell asleep. This was when they were first run. Since I didn't get hooked, I dropped it.

But now, with so many show on Hiatus, I though I'd try again. And I'm totally into it. MIlo Ventimiglia, who I'd alwys thought was just this weasely-looking drip, is actually very cute and endearing. The Indian guy? Homina homina... Ali Larter doesn't piss me off nearly as much as she often does, although there are moments where she's pushing it. And the fact that the girl who did Dot's voice in A Bug's Life grew up to be a totally hot indestructible cheerleader? I'm down with that. And also I want her hair.

I think what made me want to watch the show suddenly was seeing the guy who plays Hiro on an episode of the Sarah Silverman Program. I liked that crossover. You don't usually see people who star on a big network hit playing a grocery store clerk on a random-ass basic cable show about the most socially oblivious and mean spirited hot jewish woman in Los Angeles. Incidentally, the Silverman show is entertaining, but the jokes run out pretty fast.

I'm also trying to work my way into Jericho. It's not a very good show, but there are a couple of dangling questions that I want to see answered. I may just start doing that via recap, though, and save myself the money.

Time for sleep.